Mafia: The Old Country
HDR analysis Mafia; The Old Country on PC and PS5 Pro.
I only had one hour with the game on PS5 Pro, via trials on PS+ Premium, but HDR looks to be the same on PC and PS5 Pro, with the same HDR in-game menu (see the setup screen below).
There is a fundamental issue with the HDR. It looks washed out due to not being tone mapped correctly. It means the game can have perfect black level floor in some scenes but still look washed out because shadows / gamma are raised too much in most scenes/areas.
The 4 pictures of the opening screen in the game illustrate this perfectly.
Picture;
1) PS5 Pro - HDR
2) PC - HDR
3) RenoDX HDR mod on PC
4) RenoDx HDR mod on PC + Lilliums black floor fix
The reason the black level floor is higher in 1) than 2) is because I have higher paper white on PS5 Pro in those pictures. It raises the upper shadows too.
We see that it looks very different and better in picture 3 using RenoDX.
There is still some black floor raise with the RenoDX mod. Usually we can fix black levels with RenoDx, but this is only the general RenoDX HDR mod that we can use for all UE4 and UE5 games.
So I use Lilliums Black Floor Fix to fix the rest of the black level floor raise.
Picture 4 is how it looks with the settings I use when I play the game.
The end result is a massively more beautiful and correct looking HDR on PC.
So on PC you should of course install the RenoDX mod, as always.
On console, you should simply just setup HDR in the in-game menu. They are pretty accurate. Peak brightness outputs close to what you setup in nits. Brightness is paper white or overall game brightness. It does not increase the black level floor but does increase upper shadows (as it must). And keep black point to zero (maybe reduce it a little).
You can’t fix the fundamental issue the game's HDR has on console. SDR isn’t better, by the way, so definitely use HDR on consoles too.
More pictures are below.
HDR setup screen PS5 Pro
SDR
shadows PS5 Pro vs RenoDX 1
shadows PS5 Pro vs RenoDX 2
